Harry D. Pomeroy was the youngest son of Dr. Theodore Clapp Pomeroy, a physician, and his second wife, Jane Amelia Blodgett of Cortland. His grandparents, Captain Stephen Pomeroy and Hannah (Polly) Clapp, started their family in Otisco, New York in 1806, after a westward journey from Southampton, Massachusetts.
Harry was a keen observer. He wrote in pocket journals since he was fourteen, and continued to do so until 1937, the year of his death at age seventy. Brief, almost telegram style entries showed he lived an energetic life, over thirty years of it in Syracuse, within many social circles: family, work, neighborhood, city, state and nation. All of these interactions were frequent, and important to him.
He was a mechanical engineer and an inventor; a recorder of detail. 2 His diary is a kaleidoscope of images, activities, and observations. Catastrophes got his attention, as did any parade or a circus. He worked diligently, but also had a peevish side that surfaced when he felt underappreciated at work. Pomeroy’s diaries are particularly interesting because they depict not only interactions at his home at 134 Baker Street and at work, but within a larger context of historical time, place, and responsibility. What was going on in the nation and the city of Syracuse mattered to him. The nation was gradually being drawn into the European war theater as a combatant, and Harry’s notes show family members getting involved in the war effort amidst their ordinary daily routines.
In 1915 when he started work as a draftsman at Semet-Solvay Company, Harry Pomeroy was fifty years old, a widower of eight years, with four children. The Semet-Solvay Company, a chemical manufacturing business, made an array of products distilled from coal in coke ovens. The preceding year, the company started building a plant to manufacture explosives, picric acid, ammonium picrate, and trinitrotoluene (TNT) at Split Rock.
As the war spread across Europe, the United States identified a need for independent supplies of ammonia because both the food and munitions industry required it. One way ammonia was used in explosives was by oxidizing it to get nitric acid. Much of this was under secret experimentation, much of it at the Semet-Solvay plant. It was a dangerous business.
During the course of World War I this company accounted for almost 25% of the nation’s military munitions. Chemical engineer Ludwig A. Zohe was in charge of the building project, and was Pomeroy’s supervisor. The TNT was set up in one quarry, and the picric acid plant in another.
In 1917, the company pressed forward with its munitions contracts, in what was a relatively new industry, handling volatile and unstable chemicals.
In April, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.
|Harry and His Horn|
Early in 1918, Harry D. Pomeroy accepted an opportunity that added focus and delight to his life. He loved music, and that year Semet-Solvay started a band. Carl Becker was their director. Marching bands and free concerts were often sponsored by large corporations during the war years. They helped enliven patriotic sentiments and financial support for the war effort, while promoting the industry or business. Pomeroy played the French horn.